(In preparation for the release of my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, I will be re-sharing old Beauty and the Beast posts. So if this post seems familiar to you, you've probably read it before.)
I just want to take a moment today to go over yet another horrifying, heartbreaking element of the Beast’s suffering in the original Beauty and the Beast. I recently read the translation in the Gutenberg book I’ve linked here, to confirm it was legit before sharing, and I noticed a detail that I’d missed on my previous readings.
The Beast’s mother—his bio mother, not his creepy foster mom who wanted to marry him—was present when he was cursed. The fairy was attempting to ask her for her son’s hand in marriage, and she and her son both said no.
A quote from the fairy, to the queen: “I warn you that if you acknowledge to anyone that this monster is your son, he shall never recover his natural shape.”
Can you even imagine? You trusted this woman to take care of your son while you were at war. You love your child so much, and you’ve been separated from him for years, doing your duty as queen, protecting your subjects. You miss him. You miss him so much. And this is the woman you trusted to raise him.
She makes this outrageous suggestion, and you realize that you should never have trusted her, that she’s been grooming your son for who knows how long, and the only good thing about this situation is that at least she’s not very good at grooming, because your son clearly doesn’t like the idea any more than you do.
So you say no, because what else could you possibly say, and then she turns your baby into a monster, and then she forces you to sever ties with him if there’s to be any hope of the spell ever breaking.
I often go years at a time between rereading things like this, and this detail had completely slipped my memory, and I have spent all this time thinking, “What is wrong with this poor Beast’s mother? We know she’s alive, because she shows up at the end; why wasn’t she here earlier? Why wasn’t she here the whole time?”
Well, it turns out there’s nothing wrong with her, and she wasn’t here because the fairy was very thorough with the curse.
All this time with an evil fairy, separated from his mother, and the Beast gets her back so briefly before the fairy separates them again, and he’s all alone, all alone for so long.
And the way the fairy phrases things, it sounds like her primary concern isn't depriving the Beast of companionship from the mother figure who hasn’t just propositioned and then cursed him, so much as she’s worried the spell will break too easily if people know there’s a spell, which of course they would if the queen was like, “Hey, everyone, this is my kid, he’s a monster now.”
But the fact that the fairy is just thinking about the logistics of the spell, and not about the Beast’s emotional state—it’s almost worse, somehow? Like, deliberately causing more emotional distress to a person, when your whole goal in life right now is to cause him emotional distress, that’s one thing. But you have raised this guy from childhood, and you don’t even think about how hard this is going to be? Like, hurting someone on purpose is terrible—and she is very much also doing that—but so is spending several years with someone and not even thinking about how this is going to hurt. If she’d thought about the separation from his mom hurting him, she would totally also have done it for that reason. But she didn’t think about it.
So now our guy has been propositioned by the woman who raised him. He’s been very briefly reunited with his mother. (And also very briefly fought in a war, that’s a thing that happened, too.) He’s been turned into a monster, he’s been trapped inside his own mind by the curse clause “I command thee to appear as stupid as thou art horrible.” And now he's been separated from his mom.
I was thinking, well, if we get to the point, several years down the line, where it’s becoming clear that the spell isn't going to break, maybe we could just accept the consequences of breaking the fairy’s rules. Like, the Beast could go home, and the queen could tell everyone what happened. And then the spell wouldn’t break, but he could be home, and everyone would know who he really was, and could treat him accordingly.
But then there’s the ‘stupid as thou art horrible’ clause. If the queen acknowledges him and renders the curse unbreakable, he will forever be trapped inside his own head, unable to properly express himself because he has to appear significantly less intelligent than he is. This isn't just physical. Which means we can’t afford to give up on the remote possibility of the spell someday breaking.
Also, as far as I can tell he’s the only kid, the queen’s only heir. Even if the people will accept being ruled by a monster, he won’t be able to utilize his skillset to rule effectively until the spell, with that stupid clause, is broken. So even if they didn’t have to be separated for the Beast’s sake, they would have to be separated for the kingdom’s sake.
This just makes me so sad. She didn’t want to abandon her son. Abandoning him was the only thing she could do, if she wanted him to have any chance of breaking his spell. If she’d kept him close, if she let people figure it out, he’d never be free. So she set him up in the property that reminded her of her deceased husband, the estate she wanted to retire to when she was finally done with her war, and she left him. Because she had to.
Order my Beauty and the Beast retelling, To Be Loved, from waxheartpress.com!
